Music from Haïti
Music of the world
This second volume of ‘Haitian Peasant Music’ is a music fiction, a medley of the vast collections gathered off the beaten tracks from Haitian peasants during the winters of 1997 and 1998-99, and the music of Royal Bonbon, a movie by Charles Najman: A lunatic thinks he is King Christophe, a former slave and the liberator of Haiti in 1804. Roi Chacha—as he is nicknamed— reconstructs a cheap, shoddy “court”, and absurdly reigns in the Sans Souci palace, now in ruin. Alone, abandoned by all, the mad, despotic king will end up killing himself in his baroque palace.
